Cognitive Design

The design community should be on fire. 

As part of the Affordable Care Act (health care reform bill), a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) has been established to create more effective ways of delivering healthcare services in the US. The idea is to  improve the patient experience, clinical outcomes and radically lower cost or “bend the cost curve”.  This will include improving patient safety. The center has $5B in start up funds and is promised another $10B over the next 10 years.

The economic claims in the Affordable Care Act depend critically on the CMMI’s success.   Failing disruptive innovation, US healthcare costs will spiral out of control even faster.

We need new service delivery models.  Old ideas and improvement methods won’t work. For example, it takes 7 years for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to do a demonstration project.  It needs to happen in seven months.  Ideas already in the pipeline (e.g. improved care coordination, alignment of incentives, etc.) while important are far from sufficient.

What is needed is our best effort in service, experience and cognitive design for health, wellness and the delivery of ambulatory and acute care services.

Fortunately, design thinking has started to take hold in healthcare (see for example Transform) but the CMMI opportunity affords an entirely new level of involvement.

The CMMI is doing a conference call on November 29th to provide an overview and get input. I urge readers to participate and make it clear that design thinking is a key enabler for creating the new health care service delivery models we need in the US.

I am also interested in hearing form readers that have ideas on how to mobilized the design community to work with the CMMI.